Walk from England to France
Doggerland in the Ice Age
Today: an island
Today the English Channel and the North Sea separate Britain from mainland Europe. At its narrowest, the Strait of Dover is only about 32 km wide.
Lower the sea by 35 m
It doesn't take much. In the GEBCO grid, once the sea drops by about 30 m a dry path opens from East Anglia to Belgium and the Netherlands, across the shallow southern North Sea. The deep channel through the Strait of Dover stays wet a little longer.
20,000 years ago: Doggerland
At the peak of the last ice age, ice sheets held so much water that the sea stood roughly 120 to 130 m lower. The southern North Sea was a wide, low plain we now call Doggerland: you could walk from England to France, and on to Denmark.
The sea comes back
As the ice melted, the sea rose again. Between about 10,000 and 7,000 years ago Doggerland broke up into low islands, and then disappeared. Its highest ground, today's Dogger Bank, was among the last to go under.
Under the waves
Today the Dogger Bank lies only about 15 to 36 m under the North Sea. Fishing boats and dredgers still bring up stone tools and bones from the drowned land.
Pull the plug and watch the sea level fall, explore the seafloor as real terrain, find what lies off your own coast, and follow guided stories, from the Ice Age land bridge between England and France to the wreck of the Titanic. Everything is built from GEBCO's grid of the world's ocean floor and land.
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Stories
- Walk from England to France: Doggerland in the Ice Age
- Asia to America on foot: Beringia, the Ice Age land bridge
- Where the Titanic rests: 3,800 m down in the North Atlantic
- Drop Everest into the Mariana Trench: And watch it disappear
- The longest mountain range on Earth: is underwater: the mid-ocean ridge
Places
- Challenger Deep
- Mid-Atlantic Ridge
- Hawaiian–Emperor seamounts
- Puerto Rico Trench
- Kerguelen Plateau
- Titanic wreck site
- Monterey Canyon
- East Pacific Rise